Is Your Default Mode of Thinking God’s Truth?
Café Menu for Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Today’s Special is: Retraining Your Mind and Finding God’s Perfect Will
Carefully prepared just for you by your friend, Brenda Rodgers
Main Ingredient:
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Romans 12:2 ESV
Entrée:
I got off the treadmill that morning and sighed. It was the first time I had ran in months.
“Only 20 minutes,” I said to myself, “I didn’t run for 30 minutes like I had planned. I’m so undisciplined. When will I ever become more disciplined? Why can’t I follow through on anything? I will never meet my goals.”
The thoughts came, one after the other, and spoke with such authority. They didn’t try to convince me of their truth because they spoke what I already thought about myself. But what startled me was the rapid speed at which I thought them.
As I reflected on the morning, I realized that my thoughts were more than self-pity, frustration, or even perfectionism. They revealed my default mode of thinking. A pattern of thinking I developed from years of thinking and believing lies about myself instead of truth from God’s Word.
Recently I listened to a podcast by Tricia Goyer. Tricia interviewed Holley Gerth about her new book You’re Going to be Okay: Encouraging Truth Your Heart Needs to Hear. In the interview, Holley explained how we train our brains by what we repeatedly think. Those thoughts become our default mode for thinking. So if we think untrue thoughts, then our default mode becomes untrue thinking.
This is what I experienced the morning I got off the treadmill. I was so use to telling myself I am undisciplined, instead of focusing on the discipline I showed by waking up early and running for 20 minutes, I immediately thought about the 10 minutes I didn’t run.
But where do our untrue thought patterns come from? Our enemy, Satan, is the father of lies. His number one goal is to get our minds off of God’s Truth. When we take our minds off of God’s Truth, and think and believe the enemy’s lies, we respond to them through our actions. This is how our lives get off course and outside God’s perfect will for us.
The good news is we can retrain our minds so that our default mode of thinking is God’s Truth. This is what Paul talks about in Romans 12:2 and this is the path to discerning God’s perfect will for our lives.
Take Out:
The only way for us to know God’s perfect will for our lives is to create a default mode of thinking based on God’s Truth. This allows us to see clearly from God’s perspective and not just our own and know His will for our lives. We do this by replacing the enemy’s lies with God’s Truth through intentional Bible reading, Bible study and Bible memorization. The more we saturate our minds with truth, the closer we will come to doing God’s will.
Dessert:
Jesus, I am constantly bombarded with thoughts that are contrary to Your Truth. Even though my default mode of thinking may be set on untruth, Your grace is still sufficient to renew my mind and create within me a new pattern of thinking. Thank You, Lord, for making all things new. Please help me to replace the lies I believe with Your Truth so that I can know Your perfect will for my life. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
© 2014 by Brenda Rodgers. All rights reserved.
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Originally published Tuesday, 08 July 2014.
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